Skip Sweeney

Skip Sweeney (b. 1946) studied theater arts at Santa Clara University before becoming involved in the Bay Area video scene in the late 1960's, where he was a co-founder of Electric Eye, an early media collective concerned with video performance and experiments. In 1970, Sweeney founded Video Free America, a San Francisco media arts center and communications nexus, with Arthur Ginsberg. Sweeney's work in video included abstract image-processing and synthesis, autobiographical documentaries and portraits, and video installations for theater including a version of Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish (1977). Tuning and tinkering for hours to produce shimmering, interweaving video mandalas, Sweeney was one of a handful of people who mastered video feedback. Sweeney later worked in collaboration with Joanna Kelly, producing video dance tapes, video art, and documentaries.

Video Feedback

1983

Video Feedback presents images created by a video camera that is aimed at an angle into a video monitor. The system allows the viewer to control and manipulate the camera's relationship to the monitor as well as the f-stop, zoom, and focus of the camera's lens. The black-and-white images pulsate and evolve as the camera responds to the images that it sends to the moniitor. A very important early example of video feedback by an early master of video feedback.